A Few FAQ’s About Kristine…for friends, family and well, anyone else :-)
Filed under: Facebook, Google, Internet Marketing, Local Online Marketing, Niche Marketing, Online Marketing, twitter
So often I get asked the question “What exactly do you do?” and most often this question comes from friends and family members. If you work online yourself, and you’re reading this, I’m sure that you get these same kinds of questions, and they’re not often easy to answer are they?
Unless your business runs solely online, you probably get some odd looks from time to time when you say “I’m an affiliate marketer” or “I run niche websites.” Most often, these answers are met with a blank and confusing stare. And there’s nothing wrong with that, not at all! If someone came up to me and said “I’m a Comb Capper” I’d probably give them a pretty blank stare myself.
(A Comb Capper is someone who hacks off the top of honeycombs in order to get to the honey inside of a hive. And yes, I had to look that up!)
But what I’ve found is for those folks who don’t work on the Internet, it can be a little difficult to understand exactly what we do and how we can turn a job out of it.
So for those of you with tons of curiosity, here’s the 30-foot view of my “job” online. Although I don’t really think of it as a “job” since I truly love doing what I do.
My primary job is that of owning and operating WirthMarketing.com which helps local businesses get found by current and potential customers online. You can either hire me to do the work, consult with you, or come to speak to your business about it.
As a matter of fact, local businesses are gaining SO MUCH steam online, and there is such a mass amount of confusion surrounding local online marketing, I’ve also decided to…
…create an online video course specifically for local businesses. This video course takes local business owners step-by-step through the entire process of getting their business online. From adding their businesses to Google and Bing, to getting listed in the Yellow Pages online, to creating a website and optimizing it so that the search engines can find it and show it to who really matters…their current and potential customers. (wow! that’s a run-on sentence isn’t it?)
On top of that, I’m writing a book on this exact same topic. This will either be available at your local bookstore (provided someone finds it important enough to publish) and if not, I’ll still add it to Amazon for download.
Since I’ve worked online for so long (initially part-time from 1996-2000) and full-time since the year 2000), and worked for companies such as Working Mother Magazine (mainly doing their back-end PHP programming and database work), I’ve created dozens if not hundreds of websites all focusing on specific niches.
Some of these sites worked well, and others not so well, but, such is the life of working online. I make money from these websites by recommending products that people may be interested in; if someone is interested in a product I talk about, and they subsequently buy it, then I make a commission. This online, is referred to as “affiliate marketing”, offline it’s referred to as a “salesman” (or woman). 
Sometimes people don’t even have to buy a product, all they need to do is click on a link from an ad on one of my pages, and I make money. Not as much, mind you, but it’s still another source of income.
During these years online I became extremely interested in how search engines like Google ranked websites.
Just building a website is not enough. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
And, me, being as analytical as I am, became very curious as to what search engines like Google and Bing found to be “important” when determining how to rank websites. Again, I found a lot of confusion online from website owners about this topic and so I created BoneheadSEO.com which is currently in hiatus (because I’m busy creating the local online marketing course), but will soon be revived with much up to date information. You can read some of my past blog posts here.
My other website at KristineWirth.com (which is where you’re reading this at), currently gets tens of thousands of views per month. And is a blog that focuses on online marketing in general, as well as affiliate marketing.
My “Main” website which is the hub to all of the aforementioned sites (aside from my niche websites), is KristineWirth.net (and this is brand-spanking new). I needed a “mothership” if you will that let people have a one-stop access to all of my sites. This way, whomever stops by can pick and choose what they want to read about, whether that be local marketing, online marketing in general, affiliate marketing, or search engine optimization.
Now, you’ll often see me post on Facebook and my Facebook Page information that may seem a little strange to you. This is because in both of these places there are many people in the same kind of industry that I am. About 80% of the time, the updates that I make in these locations is information that I believe is helpful to them and their online businesses.
Sometimes too, you’ll see me make updates that contain weird little characters such as “@” and “#”. The @ symbol is a symbol used on Twitter in order to refer to someone else. So if your name on Twitter was “JohnDoe” I would reference you in my Twitter update by using your name on Twitter (@JohnDoe). The hash symbol, or “pound” sign (#) is what’s called a hash mark on Twitter and this is used whenever you want to reference something in particular.
For example, recently, I used the hash tag of #bss11 which references an online blogging event that will have speakers who are considered very powerful and popular people in my industry.
Those who are attending or speaking at this event also use this hash tag whenever they’re referencing the same event. That way, anyone who is interested in the event can look up the hash tag on Twitter and see all of the updates about it.
In an effort to streamline my updates so that I’m not having to visit each individual source and make updates for hours on end, I use two separate programs; Amplify and Hootsuite. Sometimes it just depends on my mood which one I use. These programs allow me to update all over the Internet by making one single post which is why you sometimes see the @ symbol and the # symbol in my updates at Facebook especially. These are specific references to Twitter.
In a nutshell, I live and work online.
Someone once said to me “Wow, you’re on Facebook a lot.” Which is true. I’m on Twitter a lot too. The best explanation for this is that the Internet IS my office. Much like others leave for work in the morning and head off to their office building, I head to my own home office, fire up my computer and my laptop and get to work.
So I hope that helps to answer any questions anyone has about me and why you always seem to see me online. If you do, it means that I’m “in my office working”.
A Real-Life Lesson On Local Marketing
Filed under: Local Online Marketing, Online Marketing
About a week ago, I began to have problems with my laptop. Every so often I would lose the visibility of the screen. Moving the screen back and forth seemed to help bring it back for a little while but eventually the screen simply went “all white”.
As someone who relies on their laptop quite frequently when I visit businesses, give talks, or simply consult, this was pretty much devastating to me. I needed help and I needed it fast.
So I did some research locally for a computer repair business and found one easily with my city.
I clicked on their link to their website trying to find their hours, their specific location, a way to contact them and so on.
They had plenty of information on their site as to how long they’ve been in business (10 years), the kinds of repairs they performed, their email address and their telephone number.
But….much to my dismay, no business hours.
So, I checked out their Google Places Page…even less information was there.
So I sent off an email to them quickly before having to run out for the day (with no laptop in hand, sadly), and kept checking the email on my phone to see if they had responded.
Nothing.
Yes, I could have called them but quite frankly, I had already sent an email and was incredibly rushed as it was. I figured (especially in this day and age) that email would suffice.
Two days later and I still hadn’t heard back. So, over the weekend, my husband and I found the documentation for the laptop and decided to fix it ourselves. Which worked fantastically by the way. Turns out, the connector for the screen wasn’t plugged in properly within the laptop.
Easy fix, saved me $85 and I don’t have to wait for someone else to repair it, or send it off to the manufacturer and wait a few weeks.
The moral of the story is this:
If you’re a small business and have your own website, it’s incredibly important to place your hours on your website and within your Google Place Page. People need to know when you’re open – especially if you’re a service-based business.
Also your Google Place Page is a fantastic spot to put all of the information about your business that people truly want to know. Things like rates, location, do you require people to visit your store or do you come to their location? A little bit of information goes a very long way.
It’s beneficial to you, as the business owner, to use an auto-responder whenever someone sends you an email. This way, the person sending the email will know that they’ve been acknowledged and the email should provide information such as when they can expect a return email, a call back, or any other kind of information that’s relevant to the customer.
In the end, it worked out for me, I saved some money and ended up learning how to fix my own laptop.
But for the local business, they lost a sale. And I can only speak for myself but I’d be willing to bet that my situation is not unique.
You see people today rely heavily on information they find online regarding local businesses. They’re pressed for time, have children to attend to, have jobs they need to get to, and so on. This is one reason why people decide to forego using the printed Yellow Pages and instead head online; it’s simply faster and easier.
But, only if the local business can attend to those customers who do find them online.
So if you’re a local business, have a presence online and know how to deal with that presence properly, you’ll find that you are getting a lot more customers locally. When you can cover both sides of the marketing coin, off-line marketing and on-line marketing, you, as a local business have got a huge leap on your competition.
What have been your experiences regarding local businesses online?
Prevent Website Crawl Errors…Now
Filed under: Marketing, Online Marketing, seo, Web Sites
I once heard it stated that “…website designers keep SEO’s in business.” And while that might irritate a few web designers most of the time when it comes to getting a website indexed, ranked and visited, it’s the design of the website itself that can be the culprit.
So how do you know if the firm you hired has done “all the right things” on your site so that when the search engines come to pay a visit, they’ll happily run through your field of flowers like a little girl on a warm spring day?
- Check your mark-up code. You can check your code for free online by visiting the W3C Markup Validation service. There are a lot of “best practices” stated by W3C and as mentioned here, suggested by Bing. Without listing them all, which will make your head spin, just visit (or better yet, have your website designer visit)http://www.w3schools.com/.There’s been some debate on whether or not Google takes proper code into account but…one website did do a very small test on four of its pages and found that Google tended to prefer the page with the proper mark up code.My advice? Especially if you’re using XHTML is to be absolutely 100% compliant. HTML seems to have a little bit more wiggle room. But…even with that said, it’s better to be safe than sorry and just be sure your code is up to standards.
- Bad Links. ”Bad” links aren’t just links to bad neighborhoods, they’re also those broken links that you have *gasp!* within your own website or from your website that point out to external sites. Now, you obviously can’t control whenever someone else moves or gets rid of one of their web pages but you most certainly can find out which links on your site are broken both internally and externally.I suggest using a free program called Xenu’s link sleuth. This will do a check on all the links on your site to see which ones encountered errors. Depending upon how large your site is, you may want to run this at least once a week.Other “bad” link problems are…
- missing page elements – for example, images aren’t loading properly on a page. This is why it’s so important to usecanonicalization(video) when linking up anything on your site.
- Don’t use scripts for internal site navigation. Instead just use anchor tags with keywords as the anchor text.
Other coding errors that can create issues (as stated by Bing) are:
- Missing, empty or duplicate title tags. (Note the duplicate title tags especially). What Bing is saying is that you should not use the same title on more than one of your site’s pages (sage advice).
- Missing, empty or duplicate meta description tags.
- Missing, empty or duplicate H1 tags.
Additionally, according to Bing, if you use a 302 redirect on any of your web pages note that it DOES NOT pass link juice. Proper SEO dictates the use of 301 (permanent) redirects.
You can read Bing’s coding guide here.
This post is an excerpt from Bonehead Bits – The SEO Newsletter. To get your copy before the public does (for free), click here now and get signed up.
